'Final Destination' wasn't final enough

By WILLIAM ARNOLD, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

Published
10:00 pm PST, Thursday, January 30, 2003

If you happened to miss the 2000 teen horror hit, "Final Destination," no problem. In the title sequence of "Final Destination 2," two TV talking heads go over the premise in detail, and the characters discuss it so often you end up feeling as if you've seen that movie a dozen times.

Seems there was this teenager who had a premonition his plane to Paris was going to explode, so he got all his pals off. When the plane did indeed explode, Mr. Death felt cheated, and spent the rest of the movie getting even with the borrowed-time teenagers.

Now, exactly one year later, another teenager gets a similar vision of a massive freeway pileup, so she abruptly stops her SUV on the on ramp and saves the lives of those in the cars immediately behind her -- who mostly just happen to be attractive young people.

So, once again, Death spends the movie getting even via ghoulish accidents: teenagers crushed flat by falling construction objects, impaled by various sharp instruments, severed in two by unlikely flying objects, blown up in gas explosions.

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There's some authentic nail-biting suspense here, and some of the accident sequences are imaginatively, even lavishly produced. But the Vancouver-shot exploitation film is just a series of Grand Guignol skits played for mean-spirited laughs.